Like a Stone
by Mere Anarchy
Summary: Kakashi learns to see the Memorial in an entirely different light when Sakura is around. [Suspended until I decide whether or not I like it.]
1. The Rock With Feelings

Rain. Wind. Snow. Fog. No matter what the conditions, he was there. Sitting silently, no expression and no voice– some even mistook the silver-haired jounin for a rock just like the one he wasted away in front of.

Because that's what it was, really. Just a rock inscribed with name after name after name of ninjas who died protecting their village. A noble way to die, they said. It was an _honor _to have your name on this stone. An honor to be cold and lifeless, six feet under the ground.

Sometimes (and there was safety in 'sometimes'), Kakashi thought people put to much stock in _how_ a person died. _Who_ died was exponentially more important. . . Right?

Days like these (_humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug_) made Kakashi doubt himself. What are we but mysteries all too easily solved? What am I but a mask?

The jounin sighed, and shifted from one foot to another. The thoughts filtering through his head were unbidden, unwanted; he was mere seconds away from whipping out Icha Icha Paradise when a distraction occurred in the form of a pesky, irritating insect.

"KAKASHI-SENSEI!"

This from Konoha's number one hyperactive knuckle-headed ninja, Uzumaki Naruto.

Kakashi produced a long-suffering sigh and shifted his weight back to the original foot. His gaze never wavered from the memorial stone in front of him, his expression never altered. "Yo."

"ME AND SAKURA-CHAN ARE HEADED FOR THE RAMEN STAND! BELIEVE IT!"

Kakashi's shoulders slumped. He knew what was coming, and as much as he hated to disappoint his former student–

"I'm not going with you."

His typical response elicited a giggle from the pink-haired kunoichi at Naruto's side. A kunoichi who would've given Naruto the same response if she hadn't been so hungry.

The fox boy scowled. "What makes you think I was going to ask?"

Another shift of weight from the infamous copy-nin. Today (_humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug_) he was not in the mood to deal with a certain blonde-haired nuisance. His shoulders, already half their usual width, slouched even further in a futile attempt to disappear.

"Why don't you go on without me, Naruto?" Sakura asked the orange-clad future Hokage gently. "I'll catch up in a minute."

Kakashi tensed imperceptibly. She was staying? No one ever interrupted him _here_. Those who knew the story behind it all (days on end of staring at this rock of no emotion, days on end of trying to pretend he had no emotion himself) gave him as much room as possible to mourn, or not mourn, or whatever it was that he did. Those unwise enough to think he was hiding a physical deficiency under his mask simply paid him no mind. Which was ridiculous, anyway, because everyone knows that ninja only wear masks to hide the scars on their souls. Ninja are proud of physical scars; but the emotional scars, now those are something to bury as deep as you can without forgetting yourself. Or maybe as deep as you can without remembering. Days like these, after all, made Kakashi doubt himself.

Perhaps Sakura saw all of this. Perhaps this was why, when Naruto complained ("Aw, but, Sakura-chan!"), she merely gave him an irritated look and stood her ground.

"Oh, alright," Naruto sighed after a pause, raising his hands in an 'I surrender' sort of way. " But I'll probably be finished with all my ramen by the time you get there!"

"You? Finished with ramen? Did I just mishear that?" Sakura laughed, watching Naruto sprint off to be with his one true love.

Kakashi stayed quiet. Patience was something he had in abundance today; hell, he was the copy-nin. He always had patience. It was only a matter of waiting her out, and, Sakura being Sakura, it shouldn't take too long. So he settled himself more comfortably on the ground, as did she, and together they waited.

It probably should've been awkward. He was her sensei, yes, but he was always more of an enigma to her than a person. And now she was a full-fledged kunoichi, but she had always been merely a love-sick little girl in his mind. They barely knew each other. It really should've been awkward.

Somehow, though (and there was safety in 'somehow'), Kakashi didn't mind her presence as he thought her would; the hesitant way she shifted every few minutes was no distraction. He stayed concentrated on the stone; emotionless.

After a while she spoke, murmuring the words so quietly he could have mistaken them for the breeze. "Isn't it funny, how we can make even something as impersonal as this stone have feelings?" As if to illustrate her point, the girl reached out and caressed the name of some forgotton chuunin, fingers tracing the imprinted letters with gentle ease.

The copy-nin felt some measure of alarm in her statement. The memorial stone? Feelings?

These were the two things he had once thought impossible to mix; yet here was his student, putting them together so effortlessly he had to check again to make sure it wasn't some sneaky friend of his wearing a disguise.

But no, no, this strange person was Sakura all right. His student, albeit a stranger. And, as her teacher, he felt a strong urge to correct her misguided statements.

She never gave him the chance. The silver-haired jounin felt a strange dissatisfaction as she stood to leave, brushing the seat of her pants off casually (_when had she started wearing pants?_).

"Well, I'll see you later, sensai!" she chirped. "Naruto won't wait forever."

She turned and walked away, leaving Kakashi with his sorrow. He watched her, wanting to call her back and demand an explanation (_what made you so wise all of the sudden? how can you switch emotions so fast? and where the hell did your dress go?_), but not even bothering to open his mouth.

Maybe he wanted one mystery to remain unsolved. For the time being, anyway.

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Sakura blushed the entire way to the ramen stand.

_Baka! How could you be so stupid? _she berated herself. _He probably thinks you're the biggest loser to ever hold a kunai. _

She wasn't sure why, exactly, she'd said what she did, or even why she sat with him in the first place. It certainly wasn't for the stimulating conversation; not that she would've had any with that idiot Naruto. He'd just seemed. . .

The girl sighed, unsure of herself. Kakashi had always been slightly _different_, but she'd never needed to know why until now. A single hand made its way absently through her hair. She must've seemed like a complete imbecile, babbling on about a rock having feelings. A _rock_ having _feelings_. Really.

She wasn't sure what came over her. One minute she'd been sitting there, studying that rock he apparently found so fascinating, and the next minute her mouth had been forming words without first informing her brain. Words that felt strange on her tongue, because normally she hid them so deep inside, nothing could free them. Something had turned her inside-out so her most precious secrets were right at the top, for anyone at all to see. Kakashi had just been an innocent bystander.

That still didn't change the fact that he was probably questioning her sanity right now. No doubt about it, Sakura would have to go back to set things straight. Just not today, when the humiliation was still fresh in her mind.

_Well_, she told herself dryly, _at least I know where to find him._

And with that last thought, she forgot about the silent, masked figure who mourned with no emotions by a rock that seemed so alive. She let him slip back into his own little world; saving him, it would seem, for another (_humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug_) day.

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That's all for now, but I'll try to update soon. I'm not making any promises, though (consistency is not something I do well). Review if you feel like it, but if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all! And it's not like I'm going to hunt you down if you read it but don't leave a comment. Not that I can tell if you do that, but--

Sorry, I kind of went off on a wild tangent. See ya!

-Mere Anarchy


	2. Midnight Meeting

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to CloeyMarie (Yes, I know I already dedicated a chapter to you on my SasuSaku story, but I'm doing it again b/c you rule) and MyAgent'llSendYouAGiftbasket, as they are my only reviewers as of yet. I hope ya'll like it!

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Sunburn. That's what you get for waiting for the copy-nin, master of 1000 jutsus and the art of being late, to show up. Day after (_humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug_) day.

Sakura slathered some more of the magical remedy known as Aloe Vera on her aching shoulders and leaned back on her bed, thinking about the origins of her burn.

Three days was a long time to go without visiting a place you practically live at. A suspiciously long time. And Sakura was almost positive Kakashi hadn't been to the stone since their brief conversation three days ago.

At first it had been a casual thing; simply a glance over in the memorial's direction as she passed it on the way to the ramen stand. But increasingly it became a bigger and bigger deal until, on the third day, Sakura had gone to the stone in the morning and not left until the sun had vanished from Konoha's (_cloudy and somehow smug_) sky that night.

Resulting in a sunburn of the heinous variety and an equally heinous speech from her mother on keeping up appearances (_"You don't want to end up like that Hatake character, do you, dear? Oh, don't give me that look. I know he was your teacher, but that awful mask! He must be hiding something."_). There was no explaining things to her parents– after attempting that feat she had promptly been banished to her room to apply Aloe Vera in copious amounts and sulk.

It was Tsunade's fault, all of it. If only she hadn't given Sakura a full week of vacation, that short exchange with her ex-sensei would've faded into the din of the medical profession, lost amongst senbon wounds and healing jutsus. Instead she had gone home and, after the initial period of forgetting all about the interlude, lain in bed at night and replayed every word spoken in her mind. In fact, the only way Sakura could think to rid herself of this newfound obsession was to request reinstatement at the hospital from Tsunade.

But that could wait until morning. Right now, she had the oddest urge to visit the memorial stone. . . again.

There was no real reason to be visiting the stone. Sakura hadn't lost someone important to her in a long, long time; and he wasn't _dead_, anyway. Surely she could glean no comfort from a mere chunk of earth, immortalized by mourners and sadists alike. And surely _Kakashi_ wouldn't be there; not if he was sane, at least. So why go now, in the middle of the night?

It must've been the moon, she finally concluded. The moon always made her feel so _liberated_. She was free from all the expectations she could never fulfill, expectations she had never wanted in the first place.

On top of that, it always reminded Sakura of her own power. At times the moon seemed like a mere fragment of a whole orb; broken by events out of its control. But every once in a while it (_she_) proved everyone wrong. It (_she_) wasn't broken at all. Just. . . hidden.

She had to remind herself of that power as she silently opened her window and crept onto the roof. To say her mother wouldn't be pleased to find her daughter sneaking off to the memorial stone at midnight would be an understatement (_"What would people say, Sakura?"_). But a glimpse of the moon through the trees was enough to convince the pink-haired girl to journey on. She was a 16-year-old ninja, for God's sake! She had seen (_done_) things her mother couldn't conjure in her worst nightmares. She was a kunoichi.

The window latched behind her, sealing the deal. If she couldn't sneak out of her own house with civilian parents, Sakura wasn't fit to wear the headband.

_Maybe I'm not so worthless, after all,_ the girl thought dryly as she leaped from tree to tree in pursuit of the one thing (_person_) that had been on her mind the past few days. _Not worthless at all. _

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Sakura temporarily forgot her destination and relished in the feel of wind in her hair as she flew through Konoha's thick woods. She didn't realize she was speeding until she was reminded by a flash of silver– a flash of silver that was not the moon.

As she skidded to a stop as quietly as she could, Sakura prayed that the perverted jounin hadn't noticed her. Somehow it would feel awkward; him knowing she was racing to the stone, _to him_.

She wasn't, of course, racing to him– it would just seem like that. The girl supposed that, in a roundabout way, any sensei–student relationship would have it's fair share of clumsiness. But Sakura really didn't want their current relationship to be any more awkward than it had to be.

So it was with as much dignity she could muster that she marched into the clearing and announced, "You've been gone for three days, sensei."

And it was with as much amusement he ever allowed himself to show that he turned and said, "You've been counting, _student_."

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_Kakashi wasn't known as one of the most elite jounin in the village for no reason. He _was_ elite, and he _had_ noticed Sakura from a mile away. But he stayed, letting her hesitate in the trees for a moment. He waited for her to make her presence known. Sakura being Sakura, it shouldn't take too long. _

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The pink-haired girl was glad the moon had briefly covered the clouds– blushing was probably not the wisest thing to do at this point.

"You _were_ my teammate, you know," she told him in an annoyed tone. "It is perfectly normal to wonder where your teammates run off to. God, you make it sound like a _bad_ thing!"

"Not a bad thing," Kakashi defended mildly, as if he frequently had debates with old students by the memorial stone in the middle of the night. "Just. . . an odd one. I'm not exactly your sensei anymore."

"No, but– sensei, you're bleeding!"

Kakashi winced. The moon picked such inopportune moments to come out of the clouds. "Yes, Sakura, I'm bleeding," he sighed. "It does happen, _every so often_, on A-ranked missions."

Sakura ignored him, reaching out instinctively to get a feel for the extent of the damage. "How did I _miss_ this?" she asked upon further investigation of his wounds. "What kind of medic am I?"

"A very good one," Kakashi smiled. "One who was ordered by her _sensei_ to take a week off and not use any unnecessary chakra."

"Wha– oh, you mean Tsunade. How did you know about that?"

"Well, there's this unpleasant little encounter at the end of every mission where the honorable Godaime screams her head off at you for any mistakes you may or may not have made while on the job," Kakashi drawled, crossing his arms. "I found that little tidbit tucked away in a rather disturbing rant about my 'phobia of hospitals'. It's amazing, really, what you can discover if you listen to that woman for long enough. Most people just tune her out."

"Again with the sarcasm," Sakura laughed. "She's not that bad, you know. Just. . ."

"Slightly insane?"

"_Temperamental_," Sakura finished, rolling her expressive eyes. "And the woman is an absolutely brilliant medic. I've really learned a lot, these last few years. . . Now hold still; I'm about to demonstrate a new jutsu I've been _dying_ to show off."

Sakura somehow knew that the moment she reached to pull him closer he would disappear, gone like the night slinking away in the face of dawn. It was such a Kakashi-ish thing to do. But it was disappointing, all the same. So disappointing that–

"Boo." Sakura stiffened as she felt Kakashi's breath on the back of her neck and whirled around. But she was too late, and he was already gone.

"Sensei, those wounds are nothing to joke about!"

There was no response. She tried again.

"I'll buy you a month's worth of Icha Icha Paradise!"

There was a silence, then a quiet rustling as the copy-nin emerged from the foliage a few feet in front of the girl, his one eye studying her lazily. "Okay."

Sakura could only stare at him, mouth open slightly. _It actually worked? _

"I'm all your's," the silver-haired jounin said. Sakura noticed the creases in his mask as he smiled and visibly hesitated.

This jutsu would require a lot of close contact, and somehow she knew that the awkwardness of it all would be off the charts. When Team 7 had been a fully functioning squad, she used to sit on his back while he did push-ups during training; it had never bothered her then. This, she knew, was different. She was older, for one, and as he'd put it earlier, he wasn't exactly her sensei anymore. Things were bound to get. . . complicated.

"Let me guess." Kakashi's lazy drawl promptly brought her mind back to the matter at hand. "It was a bluff, wasn't it?"

It might be easy to back down, to laugh it off and walk home, defeated. But it was never so easy when pride was involved, and Sakura had pride to spare.

"I don't bluff," she told him coldly, looking straight into his single eye. "Let's get started."

Kakashi wasn't surprised by her sudden ferocity (she was the Godaime's apprentice, after all), but the swift efficiency with which she cornered him against the tree he was leaning on and brought her hands to his heart rendered him speechless.

Sakura admittedly had been furious that he was underestimating her, but she would swear that her body had moved of its own accord. _Hey, I didn't tell you to do that_, she thought in mortification as she noticed her hands cradling the hollow of his lower neck. The rest of her body was so close to his she could feel the warmth radiating off his lithe form.

_This is taking the 'hands-on' approach a little far_, Sakura groaned to herself. _But I can't back down now._

Kakashi watched in mild fascination as Sakura's fingers began tracing patterns on his chest, gently directing his chakra. "This jutsu counteracts the effects of physical blows on internal organs," she explained, sounding knowledgeable but not quite meeting his eye. "It uses the natural flow of chakra to create a barrier around the wound of a specific organ."

The medic paused for a moment. The situation wasn't as graceless as she first expected. Maybe–

"Sakura?" Kakashi said suddenly, his voice creating vibrations in the base of his throat that tickled the medic's deft fingers and caused them to falter, if only for a second.

"Mm?" she responded vaguely, resuming the tracing with her fingertips.

"Well, I was talking to Tsunade, and–"

All at once his voice in her ears sounded so impossibly deep and velvety that she stopped paying attention to the actual words and started concentrating more on the pitch and inflection. All she could feel were the rough pads of her fingertips caressing his silky jounin uniform in figures that were becoming increasingly random.

"–which I agreed to. Do you think that's a good idea?"

"Oh." Sakura quit rubbing his chest and stepped away from him and his body heat, running a hand through her hair as she did so. "Um, sorry, could you repeat that?"

The jounin sighed. "Weren't you listening?"

"I was concentrating on. . . healing. That's a pretty bad wound, you know," she said, nodding towards the cut that ran from the top of his shoulder down to his hip.

Kakashi sighed once again. "Never mind. We'll talk about this some other time."

The girl nodded quietly, forcing back a yawn. "We could just. . . sit?"

He mimicked her nod, his sandals clicking against the pavement as he followed her to sit next to the stone. A hush fell over the two, a kind of moment where there is no need to mask silence with meaningless words. For now it was just a sensei and his student, just like the old days when she had sat on his back and admired his strength.

When his words came, so quietly she could've mistaken them for the breeze, the pink-haired girl knew that, despite her mother's misgivings, Kakashi was the best teacher she could've had as a genin. "You're an excellent medic, Sakura. You learn things quickly, and you learn them well. Any sensei would be proud to be part of such a student's education."

She wasn't sure how to respond to this, so rarely did she earn a compliment from her mysterious teacher. So she let the silence and her smile speak for her. She was proud to be his student. She was proud to be his. . . friend.

Kakashi wasn't quite finished. "That day you sat with me. . . what did you mean, that we make this rock have feelings?"

He reached out and caressed the name of some forgotten chuunin, and Sakura envied the gentle ease of his fingers as he traced the same name she had, not so long ago.

"I. . . I don't really know." The last part of her sentence was marked by an apologetic, almost pained smile. "Sometimes it's just easier to speak without really thinking about what you're saying. Sometimes. . . your words have a meaning but you don't know what it is."

The jounin nodded in a slow way, trying to wrap his mind around her words. "Or perhaps you know what the meaning is, but you can't admit it."

_How is he always so right?_

Sakura laughed quietly, the sound almost unnatural against the stillness of nature. "Perhaps."

There was a lull as the girl considered her next words. "I've never been to the memorial at night before. When I was little I always figured it would be spooky, like Halloween or one of those horror movies I wasn't allowed to watch." Sakura smiled as she reminisced, lifting a single hand to rest it on the stone. "I feel silly now. There's nothing scary about this place."

The next moment she pulled her arm back, shifting away from the rock uncomfortably. "I don't have a real reason for being here, actually. I haven't lost someone important to me in a long, long time; and he isn't _dead_, anyway." There was a hint of bitterness in her voice that Kakashi picked up, helping him further analyze the situation.

"Curiosity kills," Kakashi remarked idly, not missing the brief look of surprise on Sakura's face but not questioning it, either. He figured she would eventually say something, and, Sakura being Sakura, he could wait her out.

It only took a few minutes. "What do you mean, Kakashi-sensai?"

"Sasuke had never felt the kind of power he did during the chuunin exams. It was exhilarating, _liberating_. He wanted to know more. He was. . . curious. And eventually that curiosity drove him to lengths he would normally never take; he took steps that made him dead in Konoha's eyes. Curiosity kills."

_She's not as over him as it seems_, he thought. He considered the previous (_humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug_) day, searching for something to share, something to distract her. "I. . .wasn't paying attention."

"On your mission?" She was puzzled, but her mind was completely on him now.

"When I got the injury," he corrected. "Days like these make me–"

"Over-confident?"

The copy-nin had originally been planning on saying 'make me doubt myself.' And as soon as she interrupted him he had planned to set her straight; taking her shoulders and shaking them in frustration. But a thought occurred from out of the blue, and he closed his lips.

_How is she always so right?_

His mouth moved again, but this time he neglected to think about what he was saying. "Tonight would be a good night to die."

The pink-haired medic, so accustomed to people who desperately wanted to live, didn't look up at him but stiffened slightly. Her hand wasn't quite steady as she reached out again for the stone, and her lower lip quivered before tucking into a grim smile. "Why?"

She was waiting for an answer he didn't have, and they both knew it. Sakura sighed, a lonely sound, and hugged her arms to her legs. "In my profession, you get terribly comfortable with the idea that everyone wants to live, fiercely and with no second thoughts. But it's in-the-box thinking, I guess. If someone didn't want to live they just. . . wouldn't go to the hospital, right? And we would never be exposed to that kind of person. I guess everyone is sheltered in their own kind of way. . ." A pause, as she worked up courage. "How are you sheltered, sensei?"

The jounin made no move to reply as he stood, ruffling her hair affectionately and straightening the sword strapped to his back (_when had he started carrying around a sword?_).

Sakura felt a strange sense of dissatisfaction as he stood to walk away, and she longed to call him back and demand an explanation (_what made you so friendly all of the sudden? why do you leave without saying good-bye? and how the hell did you get that wound?_). She waited until he was almost to the edge of the clearing before calling out, "Kakashi-sensei, who gave you those wounds?"

He froze, mid-step, then answered her question in his usual cryptic style and a voice as dry as the desert. "A rather single-minded enemy." His voice took on a more casual note as he set his foot down. "Why do you ask?"

He was waiting for an answer she didn't have; both of them knew it. Eventually the silence grew too long and he left, gone like the night slinking away in the face of dawn. She was coming to expect that from him, and she wouldn't have it any other way.

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A/N: I'm not going to delete this story, but I probably won't be updating in a long time, either. I can't seem to write the next chapter, and I'm working on a couple of other things right now. Not to mention the fact that school is about to start up. I'll try to finish this some day, though. Thanks for the patience!

-Mere Anarchy


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